Kiribati Moving Entire Population to Avoid Rising Seas

The Maldives has been investigation how to move the entire nation. The Carteret Islands are already in mid-climate migration. And now, The Telegraph reports, the nation of Kiribati is making plans to move the entire population of its 32 islands to Fiji in order to avoid rising seas.

This is the last resort, there is no way out of this one. Our people will have to move as the tides have reached our homes and villages. We don't want 100,000 people from Kiribati coming to Fiji in one go. They need to find employment, not as refugees but as immigrant people with skills to offer, people who have a place in the community, people who will not be seen as second-class citizens. What we need is the international community to come up with an urgent funding package to deal with that ambition, and the need of countries like Kiribati.

The plan being negotiated would see Kiribati buying 5,000 acres of land on the second-largest island in Fiji, Vanau Levu.

Kiribati consists of 32 coral atolls and one island. Three uninhabited atolls in the nation went underwater in 1999. At projected rates of sea level rise, by 2100 all of the nation's already limited agricultural land, if not all of the land itself, will be either rendered unproductive due to soil salination or submerged.